My only view on it, really, is advice for anyone buying a Nucleus (or any NUC) is to be hyper vigilant on it during its warranty period. I say this because I was having HDMI connectivity issues while my Nucleus was under warranty but found a workaround that was sufficient for my needs. Turns out it was an early sign of the motherboard having issues. If I would have sent it in as soon as I noticed the issue, I may have been able to make the case that it was covered under warranty (as it failed out of warranty). But I didnāt and had to eat the $800 motherboard replacement cost from Roon.
My biggest, personal takeaway from all this is for me not to buy an NUC in a fancy case for a premium price again. If my Nucleus+ dies, I will look into purchasing the latest NUC board, taking my existing Nucleus+ Rev B case to a machine shop and have them cut the back out so that I can use ANY NUC board inside of it and not be limited by the output layout.
I have a Nucleus Plus Rev A. It was a demo. Itās less than two years old. It came with a one year warranty, and during the first year lost its codecs folder. It still functioned, and was returned and restored under warranty.
I think the case is part of the problem. Itās only effectively cooling down the CPU. Stock NUC cases also induce airflow thru the motherboard components via the fan and holes around the case.
Any advice on how to change the top cover? Iām contemplating grabbing a Walnut top (I have stone), but I donāt understand how the top decorative insert comes off.
Without shot-gunning out of context device/hardware information all over the internet, I want to make an empirical observation of the Titanās CPU power/performance.
Itās CPU is just under 5% less-powerful than the Intel Xeon 4210 Silver that the Taiko Extreme uses (it uses 2x CPUās, FYI) in regards to Passmark Multi Thread/Core score, and it doubles the Single Thread/Core Passmark score of the Xeon 4210 Silver. On top of being vastly more thermally and electrically efficient. A benefit of being well under the 14nm architecture of the Xeon Silver 4210.
However, itās important to note that Emile at Taiko significantly underclocks the Xeon 4210 Silver and potentially undervolts as well, whereas the chassis of the Titan seems capable of permitting its CPU to utilize turbo boost and otherwise unthrottled CPU performance (in theory; Iāve no inside knowledge), based purely on its rated TDP by Intel and the design of the chassis (heat sink mass/area, etc). The Xeon 4210 Silver is a 85w TDP part IIRC, before being down-rated to accomodate passive cooling in a music server chassis.
So, despite some in the crowd seemingly being incapable of being pleased with what Roon does (āItās just a NUC in a fancy case!ā), I find the overall CPU power, thermal efficency, case design, and package to be extremely compelling. Especially as I have been able to
recommend it to friends who are executive level/C-suite folks who simply will never elect to invest the time in building their own. They just want an appliance that works.
I wanted to experience the Titan perfromance so bought the Asus NUC Pro on which it is based. It does perform very well under RoonOS but it has got the potential to do much better under Windows 10/11 i suppose (as indicated by older gen NUCās).
I sure hope Roon adresses the sub par performance for older NUCās in RoonOS, even my original Nucleus+ does not perform sufficiently good for 10K album library anymoreā¦ (under RoonOS, with Win11 it does very well indeed)
Performance, Usability and Soundquality, the three legs of this old bar stoolā¦
1 Like
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
704
Hi, just finished setting up a Mac Pro trashcan with Roon (from my previous rock server on a lenovo mini PC), I upgraded it to the latest Sonoma version of the OS using open core.
It has better looks than any nucleus, and it was a bargain with 2TB of disk 32GB RAM and a 12core Xeon.
I use parametric eq and upsample, from the latest tests I think the sound improved I can only put it on the extra processing power of the Mac Pro. The whole setup was about $400USD compared to the starting price of $3,999 of the Nucleus Titan.
And extra benefit is the Mac Pro integration with all the rest of my apple products that I have in the house.
My Roon Server runs on a very big, very bad Synology Rackstation with 20 Gbit/s of network bandwidth.
No matter what I do with Roon, memory and CPU usage rarely reach 10%, even with all of the other stuff running, so Iāve no interest in a Nucleus or NUC or any other form of device. Iām savvy enough to look after it all - I replaced a failing database drive, reinstalled Roon and restored everything just 2 days ago.
That said, the Nucleus Titan is a high performance appliance, which for the less technically savvy, is very easy to get up and running as a Roon core.
That has a value. Like the white glove treatment you get when buying high-end hi-fi components or speakers. Some donāt want to tinker - they just want to pay someone else do the setup and then enjoy the music.
Interesting. I have exactly the same trashcan MacPro (with highest spec). I didnāt know you can install Sonoma on it. I have a NUC 7i5BNH based ROCK server for 5 years which is running slow, so I recently tried to use the MacPro as a Linux + RoonOS. Do you think it performs better with Mac OS? Did you get a better performance than your ROCK server?
Btw, it also performs better with multiple roon endpoints I have three in my house and I got better performance than before when streaming to all at the same time
Hi there, in answer to your question, yes i got a lot better performance compared with my now repurposed rock server( i7-6700T hasta 3.6 GHz, 32 GB de RAM, SSD NVMe de 1 TB), I can only attribute it to the more robust build of the Mac Pro.
If you have an apple ecosystem, there are additional benefits like in my case mutual backups between my Mac mini M2 and the Mac Pro. Also you will have a transparent file server from the Mac Pro.
You can also use it as an add blocker running pihole
Etc. the benefits of having a fully loaded OS.
To upgrade to Sonoma just follow the instructions here, itās pretty easy (hint you need to install booting from a USB)
It is important to consider that this old machines are really NOT for current workloads specially to produce content. It could be if you want, a web browser and office software system, where it really exceeds is as a server.
Iām really pleased with my new roon server that also as a stand alone system looks gorgeous the industrial design of the trashcan is great.
One more thing, if you happen to have a switch that supports link aggregation 802.3ad you can have both ethernet ports on the Mac Pro configured as one increasing the network throughput.
This switch will do the trick, TRENDnet TEG-082WS.
Thanks for the valuable info. Have you considered installing Linux on it? Iām still experimenting it and wonder which way is better. I actually have two trash cans, so I can try both. Iāll keep you posted.
In any case, I will use it as a dedicated Roon server only.
